35G THE S0ETIIEE5' S1IOEES OF LAKE SEPEEIOE. 



met with along the shores of the great lakes, and is rather to be com- 

 pared in its largest features, with such oceanic structures as those 

 which the currents of the Atlantic have built up on the Xew England 

 coast. On the shores of the Bay of Superior at the mouth of 

 the Nemadji River, the site of the future town of Superior has been 

 selected, and already plans are organising for constructing a railroad 

 to the Mississippi, and thus completing by this northern lake-route a 

 line of connexion between the Gulf of Florida and the great northern 

 chain of lakes which find their outlet in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence. 

 To the traveller fresh from the scenes of ancient European civiliza- 

 tion, and influenced by the preconceived ideas naturally engendered 

 by the circumstances of countries settled ages ago, and long densely 

 populated, the opening up of a highway through the wilds of these 

 western forests, and the planning and laying out of a city in this 

 remote wilderness, seem chimerical in the extreme. Xevertheless, 

 the proposed railway will only restore, for the new occupants of this 

 continent, the ancient route by which the metallic treasures of these 

 northern wilds were distributed throughout the regions watered by 

 the Mississippi, and the prized sea shells of the Gulf of Florida, 

 with the more substantial products indigenous to southern latitudes, 

 were transferred to the shores of the great northern lakes. It was 

 impossible to avoid feelings of a lively interest in looking on the 

 first clearings, and the commencement of a pier and corduroy road 

 for the city in embryo, destined, it may well be believed, to be 

 the Chicago of Lake Superior, and to rival in magnitude, and in the 

 rapidity of its growth, the most prosperous among the great cities of 

 the new world. Viewed in this light, the remarkable features of 

 Superior Bay and its tributary rivers seemed to possess a peculiar 

 interest, thus seen in their natural state, the gradual formation of 

 ages, and all untouched by the hand of man ; presenting in this, as 

 in so many other respects, a striking contrast to the ancient historic 

 rivers of Europe, with their dykes and piers, and breakwaters, the 

 monuments of enterprise and engineering skill, pertaining, like the 

 dykes of the Essex Marshes on old Bather Thames, to a date nearly 

 coeval with the Christian era, or reaching backward, like those of the 

 delta of the Nile, to the birth time of history and the infancy of the 

 human race. 



